Through my job at Photocrati I am constantly building and growing relationships throughout the photography and WordPress communities. In addition, my own personal photography work has helped me do the same things.
About once a week I browse Kickstarter for projects that I believe will do well, or hope will do well. Every so often I come across a project that I feel well deserves my financial backing. Whether it’s a few dollars here or a hundred there.
I will only back a project if I can afford it and the product or service really speaks to my needs.
One of these projects was/is Pressgram. Started by John Saddington of 8Bit (RIP 8Bit), a WordPress development company out of Atlanta, Georgia. Pressgram is John’s baby and one that is intended to be a better Instagram, where users need not to worry about license issues or terms of service (TOS).
In addition, Pressgram offers the ability to send your photographs directly to a WordPress website. That means one less plugin for me. (unless I choose to use one for added function) I currently use Instagrate Pro for importing Instagram photographs to my WordPress driven website.
For Pressgram I backed a little than I usually do because of what the project represents, the fact that it is a combination of both of my passions (photography and WordPress) and I really believe in the created and the product.
With my level of backing, I have access to the alpha releases for testing. Alpha’s are versions of software that is typically for internal testing purposes. Beta’s are versions of software typically for external or public testing purposes.
The development has been going on for some time now, but Pressgram is getting very close to completion and I am excited to share this photograph, shot with Pressgram, on my blog.
There are two things that I hope will come to Pressgram in the future. One is a must have or I won’t use it (I know… that would be a shame) and the other is a fun idea.
A must have is the ability to publish to a Custom Post Type (something mostly advanced WordPress users would utilize) rather than normal blog posts. That is how I segregate my mobile photography (iPhoneography) content from my regular content. Instagrate Pro supports this so I would imagine it’s not too difficult for Pressgram to support this.
Party Mode would be a fun feature. The idea is that an event organizer can create an event inside of Pressgram and give event attendees access to post to the event blog post. As they take pictures at the event, the organizer will get notified and has the ability to approve or deny individual photographs from being posted to the blog article. At the end of the event, the one event blog article could have a few or many photographs from various Pressgram users at the event. Think Google Plus Party Mode (Android users have this) but for a WordPress website. Cool, right?
I know this is a lot to read all on one iPhone app that isn’t even publicly available yet. But instead of just testing the blog publish feature in the app with nonsense, I figured I would write something more relevant and consumable.
Since writing this two things have happened. The first is an article of mine that John published on the Pressgram blog called Why Pressgram Is Important For Photographers. The other is John published a Pressgram WordPress plugin that makes it possible to hide the Pressgram category from your main blog. I highly recommend at least reading my article.
Thanks for reading and happy shooting,
Scott
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